Last spring was a bloody time for police officers. Chicago buried three officers in fast succession. Tampa/St. Pete, where I live, saw two officers gunned down and two more wounded (seven more police in Florida, three in Tampa/St. Pete alone, have been shot to death since then). Nationwide, by the end of the year, 59 cops had been murdered in shootings. The previous year, 2009, ended on a bloody note, too. On November 29, in Lakewood, Washington, Maurice Clemmons gunned down four officers as they sat eating breakfast in a restaurant.

Maurice Clemmons

Despite a lifelong history of extreme violence and mental instability, Clemmons’ primary experience of the justice system was “catch and release,” that is, the police caught him, and everybody else let him go. So when he went really off the deep end, is it any wonder that he picked cops — and not judges, or lawyers, or parole board members, or politicians — for his targets? Then-Arkansas-Governor Mike Huckabee pardoned Clemmons in 1999 despite a disturbing and precocious record of violence on the streets and while in custody.

Mike Huckabee

Huckabee grandstanded about his Christian motives for releasing Clemmons and other predators, as Clemmons immediately began committing crimes again: aggravated robbery, theft, parole violation. But Arkansas justice officials continued their pattern of leniency: he managed to get out of one ten-year sentence in only two years, and his parole violations were simply ignored. A free man, Clemmons moved to Washington in 2004.

In 2009, he assaulted neighbors, passing cars, a police officer and jail employees. Yet in the amnesiatic calculus of sentencing, he was only charged with a fraction of these assaults and was released on bail. That week, he sexually assaulted two young nieces and held them captive. Arrested again, he was evaluated by psychologists who said that he was dangerous, but another judge granted him bail.

Unsurprisingly, Clemmons also ignored the terms of that bail: he had been taught by “the system” that breaking the law after an arrest is frequently overlooked. Arkansas authorities notified Washington state and said they didn’t care that he had violated parole in their state, so he was not extradited. He purchased guns and showed them to several relatives and friends, telling them that he was going to kill policemen and schoolchildren. He did this at a Thanksgiving dinner at which he was apparently welcomed despite the sexual assault of his child relatives. He talked there about his plans to cut off his GPS monitor in order to lure police to his house to kill them. Nobody called the police to warn them. He cut the GPS monitor off his ankle, and nothing happened to him. He even told people that he had tried to drive to a police station to start shooting people but had experienced car problems. Nobody dialed 911.

The story of Maurice Clemmons is like a fable where people drift slowly towards a crisis, seemingly without the means to veer away. Yet this is not true: anyone might have alerted police that Clemmons had purchased a weapon and was planning to use it to kill innocent police officers and schoolchildren. On the other hand, what if someone did dial 911? The police know that the Maurice Clemmons of the world are protected by many rules and just as many exceptions to rules. What if they picked him up, and the incident turned into an ambush where others were hurt? They would be blamed for framing an “innocent” man, a man who had “done nothing more than complain about police brutality in the past,” as the story would doubtlessly be told. The child-rapes, threats, previous assaults on authorities, and Clemmons’ criminal past would all be erased in favor of an image of a persecuted minority man. This is precisely the way the shameless Christian Science Monitor spun the story of another cop-killer in Georgia this week. Thus are the flames of anti-police hatred fanned.

A fellow Arkansas felon who was also in violation of parole drove Clemmons to the town of Lakewood. When the men saw a police car, Clemmons got out, walked into the restaurant where four officers were sharing breakfast, and shot them dead: Mark Renninger, 39; Ronald Owens, 37; Tina Griswold, 40; and Greg Richards, 42. Clemmons’ friend drove him away, and other people, including his sister, helped him escape town. Someone phoned in a false tip to police, which delayed his capture and endangered innocent people. Clemmons was finally caught two days later, when his car broke down. Armed with a dead officer’s gun, he charged another police officer, who shot him.

It takes a village to kill four policemen. Mike Huckabee, judges and parole board members in two states, Clemmons’ relatives and friends, his wife, his aunt, and his sister: they all contributed to the murders. High-ranking court officials in two states made decisions that released Clemmons back into society no matter what he did and no matter what he said he would do next. Psychologists said he was dangerous; he held two little girls captive, one for days, and sexually assaulted them, and still there were no immediate consequences, and he was welcomed by family and friends. Only police tried to remove him from the streets, and only police died.

This is the real war on cops: it involves hatred, and negligence by many authorities who aren’t policemen. All through 2010, when one officer after another was gunned down in Chicago, and Memphis, and Tampa, and Los Angeles, Barack Obama said nothing. Eric Holder, “the nation’s top cop,” remained silent.

It may be disturbing, but their silence shouldn’t be surprising. Both men have credentials that place them, politically, in opposition to police. Throughout Holder’s career, he has taken extreme positions against police safety, representing terrorists and even securing the release of murderers who targeted cops. It was incongruous for Holder to remain silent as men and women under his command experienced rising levels of violence. But it would have also been incongruous had he chosen to speak out, given his previous alliances with anti-cop social movements.

Was it incongruous for Obama to insist on staging a televised “beer summit,” allegedly designed to ease tensions between blacks and police, without once acknowledging the rising death toll of police officers of all races? Between the time when Harvard Professor Henry Gates was arrested and briefly detained, and Obama’s famous “beer summit” with Gates and the publicly chastened officer, six cops were killed or succumbed to wounds received in the line of duty. Six cops dead in a little more than a week, and in the Rose Garden, not one word was said about the public’s responsibility towards cops, or the sacrifices these cops made to keep people safe.

Thus Henry Gates’ temporary discomfort at the hands of an officer who was actually just trying to protect Professor Gates’ property was deemed more important that the murders of six cops, so much more important that the dead police were not even part of the conversation. This is a calculus, too.

A year later, Obama and Holder still had nothing to say when violence against police took a terrible toll in their hometown, Chicago. Thomas E. Wortham IV, a young Chicago officer who had ironically just returned from the memorial for murdered police officers in D.C., was gunned down in front of his father, a retired police officer. Two other Chicago cops were soon dead, to resounding silence from the White House and the Justice Department. Imagine how powerful it would have been if Obama had travelled to Chicago and talked about those deaths. He did return to Chicago for a vacation at that time. But he said nothing in public about the loss of policemen’s lives.

According to the Officer Down website, since 2009 there have been 128 officers killed by gunfire, nine fatal assaults, and 21 vehicle assaults — 159 officers murdered in 27 months. This represents a steep rise which continues to grow steeper this year. Last week, Eric Holder finally acknowledged the war on cops. But he wasn’t exactly passionate about it, the way he is with pro-offender issues, like “prisoner re-entry.”

Ask local prosecutors to identify the “worst of the worst” – offenders with criminal histories who cycle in and out of local jails and state prisons – and discuss whether any of these repeat offenders may be prosecuted under federal law for offenses that make the offender eligible for a stiffer sentence.

Considering the careers of men like Maurice Clemmons, that makes sense. But it is also in direct conflict with scores of programs and research studies Holder has been sponsoring that single-mindedly promote “alternatives to incarceration,” the types of programs that enabled Clemmons to be out on the streets in the first place and fed his paranoid, obsessive hatred. Such studies — academic activism, really — always manage to prove what the researchers were seeking: that incarceration “doesn’t work,” or is “unfair” merely because there are higher percentages of blacks than whites in prison. These claims become powerful instruments in the political movements to roll back effective sentencing in the states, including sentencing for prolific recidivists like Clemmons, who directly benefitted from efforts to reduce sentences for people convicted of crimes at a young age (one of Holder’s most passionate causes).

So why use federal law to target recidivists while you’re also quietly undercutting laws in the states that target recidivists?

Philosophically and politically, Obama and Holder side with those who oppose the best measures that tackle offenders who pose the biggest risks to police: amoral adolescents with guns and repeat offenders who ought to be serving long sentences. More importantly, through relentless talk about perceived racial injustices, Eric Holder has fed the paranoid anger of those who believe that law enforcement is illegitimate — this is, after all, the man who put his own career on the line to free FALN terrorists who targeted police and innocent civilians.

That, he certainly believed in.

Holder has a great deal more work to do before he proves that he is no longer accommodating the village that sees nothing wrong, and a great deal to recommend, in killing cops. I don’t think the nation’s so-called “top cop” is really all that interested in protecting policemen’s lives. Somebody has to say it.

In March, four police officers in Oakland California were gunned down while trying to bring child rapist Lovelle Mixon to justice. On Sunday, four police officers in Parkland, Washington were gunned down by another child rapist eluding the law.

Here are the officers killed by Maurice Clemmons in Parkland, Washington on Sunday:

Eight more officers’ lives sacrificed to the empathy/leniency complex. Their killers should have been in prison, but certain people, and policies, led to their being on the streets.

~~~

When the four Oakland officers were killed last spring, some activists shockingly sided with their killer, Lovelle Mixon.

Likewise, in 2000, Mike Huckabee overlooked Maurice Clemmons’ violent past and his record of attempting to harm corrections officers and pardoned him. Now four more officers are dead. Two child rapists, eight dead officers: were Huckabee’s actions really all that different from the radical activists who excused the actions of Lovelle Mixon?

The Seattle Times has released these records from Clemmons’ successful 2000 appeal to Huckabee. The future cop-killer was already well-versed in the language of prison-house reform and sophisticated denial of responsibility for his crimes:

“I succumbed to the peer pressure and the need I had to be accepted by other youth in my new environment and fell in with the wrong crowd and thus began a seven (7) month crime spree which led me to prison,” Clemmons wrote in his application to Huckabee.

Clemmons said he came from “a very good Christian family” and “was raised much better than my actions speak (I’m still ashamed to this day for the shame my stupid involvement in these crimes brought to my family name.),” he wrote.

Clemmons added that his mother had recently died without seeing him turn his life around and that he prayed Huckabee would show compassion by releasing him.

For his part, Huckabee has release a disturbing statement blaming other people for Clemmon’s continued freedom:

Huckabee issued a written statement Sunday night through his daughter and spokeswoman, Sarah Huckabee, saying the “senseless and savage execution” of the police officers “has saddened the nation.”

If Clemmons is found to be responsible, Huckabee’s statement said, “it will be the result of a series of failures in the criminal justice system in both Arkansas and Washington state. . . . It appears that he has continued to have a string of criminal and psychotic behavior but was not kept incarcerated by either state. This is a horrible and tragic event and if found and convicted the offender should be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law,” he said.

This time, he means.

Huckabee is similarly guilty of playing fatal politics with women’s lives by getting Wayne Dumond released early: Dumond, recall, went on to rape and kill at least two more women, having been given a friendly scolding and some free therapy for several other rapes in the past.

Here is a shattering video from the mother of one of the women Dumond raped and murdered after Mike Huckabee set him free. Disturbingly, Huckabee spent several years denying his role in Dumond’s release until the Arkansas Times’Murray Wass exposed the truth about his role.

Making light of violent crime seems to be a fixation of Huckabee’s: he named his garage band “Capitol Offense.” Funny for murder vicitim’s families, right?

While we’re at it, let’s not forget revered New York Post columnist Steve Dunleavy’s sleazy role in the campaign to get Wayne Dumond off. Dunleavy trashed the rape victims’ reputations, accusing them of lying (at least the ones who survived).

Similarly, the Village Voice’s Wade Harkavy stumbled all over his unusually limited vocabulary to summon enough words to minimize Dumon’s previous rapes (“Forced submission,” “brief penetration” and “accost” are especially nice. So is flinging around slurs like “cracker” in a major publication).

What do all these people have in common? Right-wing, Left-wing, or maximum security wing, they all believe rapists, and other violent men, deserve more understanding, less incarceration, and lots of second chances. They all believe that criminals in general, but especially sex criminals, are simply “misunderstood,” the “real victims” of society and an “oppressive police state.”

And then innocent policemen get assassinated.

This should spell the end of Huckabee. It won’t, but it should. Just watch: he’ll be playing the victim with Roman Polanski next.

The Guilty Project documents flaws in the justice system that enable serial offenders to commit more crimes.

Failure to Prosecute, Wrongful Acquittal by Jury, Early Release by State, Family/Employer Cover-Up

Dennis Earl Bradford

Dennis Earl Bradford made the news recently when cold-case investigators in Houston linked his DNA to the brutal kidnapping, rape and throat-slashing of an eight-year old child in 1990. The child survived and was able to give investigators an excellent picture of her assailant and his first name, Dennis, which he told her. Unfortunately, Bradford was not identified at the time as a suspect in the crime.

He moved to Little Rock, where he was caught, six years later, after committing a similar crime: he kidnapped a woman, raped her at knife-point, and slit her throat, telling her he was going to kill her. That victim survived as well and was able to provide Bradford’s tag number to authorities.

According to CNN, Bradford was originally charged with attempted first-degree murder, but prosecutors took the murder charges off the table for some reason. Sometimes, saying you’re going to kill someone while kidnapping them, raping them, and slitting their throat just isn’t murderous enough, I suppose.

Then a Little Rock jury refused to convict Bradford for the rape. He had bought his victim a beer and offered her a ride home. Therefore, they reasoned, she was asking for the rape, and she must have been hankering for a throat-slitting as well. They did find him guilty of kidnapping, thus putting the final touch on an incoherent, irresponsible verdict: according to this brain-trust, he moved the woman against her will, but she went right along with being cut up with a knife. And women who drink beer can’t be raped, you know.

Bradford was sentenced to 12 years in 1997 but strolled out of prison a mere three years later. He had a toddler and a baby at the time he committed the Little Rock rape. His boss thinks he’s a fine, upstanding citizen despite that little attempted murder/rape/throat slashing thing, and now the revelation about the eight-year old victim:

Bradford worked as a welder for United Fence in North Little Rock. A company representative said Bradford had been working there for 10 years and was a “good guy” who had mended “his old ways” and “changed his life.” He wouldn’t go into specifics about what those “old ways” were.

His family is similarly convinced of his excellent nature. Good thing he can’t get to his own young daughter anymore:

Members of Dennis Bradford’s family . . . say the Dennis Bradford they know would not do these things. They say he is a man his grandchildren know as a loving and gentle man.

Why can’t people like this just keep quiet, out of some simulacrum of human decency?

~~~

Lessons Learned, or Not Learned:

Dennis Bradford’s 1996 acquittal for a violent sex crime looks very much like the several free rides Sarasota (Florida) jurors and judges handed Joseph P. Smith before he kidnapped, raped and murdered Carlie Brucia.

Joseph P. Smith

Prior to having the shockingly bad luck of being caught on video abducting the 11-year old, Smith had been caught three other times attempting to abduct other victims. But after each attack, judges or jurors judged the victims instead of Smith and let him go.

In 1993, Smith jumped a woman who was walking home from a club, breaking her nose and bones in her face. A police officer interrupted the attack before Smith could make away with the stunned woman, but Sarasota Circuit Judge Lee Haworth decided to go easy on Smith, allowing him to plea to a lesser offense, granting him a mere sixty days in jail, and then reducing that sentence to weekend incarcerations.

For breaking a woman’s face, trying to drag her away, rape and likely kill her. But she’d probably had a beer or two, after all.

In 1997, Smith, armed with a knife, pepper spray, and confidence that he would not face judicial consequences, attempted to abduct a woman at a gas station by claiming he needed a jump start. She wouldn’t let him into her car but agreed to follow him back to his vehicle: luckily, someone who witnessed the odd exchange called the police, and they interrupted him again and found the weapons concealed in his shorts. The officer who stopped him wrote that Smith “intended to do great harm” to the victim.

But another judge let him off easy, letting him plead to a concealed weapons charge in exchange for probation, rather than attempted abduction.

The third attack was witnessed by a carload of retirees, who grabbed their golf clubs and chased Smith away from a screaming woman he’d jumped by the side of a road and was dragging into the woods. The retirees testified at Smith’s trial, but the jury acquitted him nonetheless: the woman had drunk a few beers, after all. Jurors bought Smith’s risible story that he thought the woman looked suicidal and he was trying to help her into the woods, to safety. They shook his hand and called him a good guy, a victim of persecution.

Then Smith raped and murdered an 11-year old.

Joseph Smith and Dennis Bradford both targeted children, targeted adults, and got let off easy for acts of extreme violence against females on the grounds that the women were asking for it. Judges and jurors simply excused their violent assaults because some of their targets were women in bars. Such prejudiced acquittals aren’t supposed to happen anymore, but any prosecutor will tell you they’re common, even with the levels of violence displayed. In some jury boxes, drinking a beer can apparently still spell “deserving rape, or death.”

And in Bradford’s case, the details of his 1996 assault suggest an experienced rapist with the forethought to do away with evidence, good character kudos from his boss at the fencing company notwithstanding:

According to a 1996 police report, the victim told investigators Bradford drove her around for 20 or 30 minutes listening to a cassette tape. He took her to a secluded area and once the car stopped, immediately he began choking her and beating her in the face.

She told investigators Bradford held a knife to her eye and threatened to cut her jugular vein several times while she was raped.

Afterwards Bradford took her to a nearby creek and demanded she wash off all of the blood and evidence.

The victim told police her attacker then drove back into town and dropped her off in front of Oaklawn racetrack. He told her he planned to kill her, but got scared at the last minute.

How many more victims will surface? You don’t start out kidnapping victims from their bedrooms and slitting their throats, nor do you simply take five years off between violent, thought-out attacks. What you do is concentrate on victimizing the types of women nobody will believe, women who drink beer, for example, who will be dismissed by jurors who look at their broken faces and slashed throats and say: “she sure was asking for it.”

Anti-incarceration activists often complain that putting men in prison “turns them into hardened criminals.” In the case of Joseph Smith and Dennis Bradford, judges and jurors letting them off easy for their crimes appear to have done the same.